ValueError: feature_names mismatch: in xgboost in the predict() function

Question

I have trained an XGBoostRegressor model. When I have to use this trained model for predicting for a new input, the predict() function throws a feature_names mismatch error,

Answer 1

From what I could find, the predict function does not take the DataFrame (or a sparse matrix) as input. It is one of the bugs which can be found here https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost/issues/1238

In order to get around this issue, use as_matrix() function in case of a DataFrame or toarray() in case of a sparse matrix.

This is the only workaround till the bug is fixed or the feature is implemented in a different manner.